Indigenous Land Knowings, Lessons, and Connections: When Nature becomes Place and People

By: Dr. Doreen E. Martinez

Dr. Doreen E. Martinez provides her introduction to her talk at the All-Staff meeting.

A special guest speaker, Dr. Doreen E. Martinez, joined us at our Fall All-Staff meeting to provide a talk on indigenous perspective and knowings, and how it can relate and inform our experience of the land, nature, and our ancestry.

Her expertise is in Indigenous knowledge systems and sociopolitical land and environment issues.  Her work focuses on how knowledge, the theoretical grounding of our lives, is engaged and practiced.  She is Mescalero, Apache and Pennsylvania Dutch, born in San Antonio, Texas; yet, raised in Pennsylvania.  Her family was the “only Martinez in the phone book.”  She is the fourth of five children and was the first in her family to wander, break ground, gain access, and pursue US formal education. 

Using a combination of collective principles, natural reason, and decolonial praxis coupled with her formal background in sociology, personal experiences, and traditional values rooted in Indigeneity, Dr. Martinez has projects that address and include mis/understandings of knowledge, collective principles, and kinship responsibilities.  She is committed to ethically engage and pass along this knowledge and understandings.  Thus, she is an avid advocate of alliance building and promoting justice. The ‘E’ in her name honors both her grandmothers.   

The talk “Indigenous Knowing” spoke of how we know what we know, and how to “be with” the land so we can serve the entire community - past, present, future. She encouraged us to look, listen, taste, and hear the lessons. Lessons of “seeing” and “being with” resonated throughout the hour presentation. Developing a “We Consciousness” of deep co-existence as land managers could be a vitally important step towards respecting and practicing lessons from Indigenous People.

For further takeaways, Dr. Doreen graciously shared her slide deck for you to recollect some of the teachings and examples she was able to portray at the meeting.

This component of the all-staff meeting was brought to you by our Nature Opportunities team, who is working to shed light on new perspectives and experiences of the outdoors by hosting a variety of guest speakers, trainings, and other development opportunities. Look for more enlightening sessions in 2024!